RESCUERS BLAST OPEN PASSAGES TO EXTRACT EXPLORER

Efforts to extract an American explorer who became ill more than 3,400 feet underground in a cave in southern Turkey expanded Friday, as international rescue teams installed communications equipment and blasted open narrow areas to allow the passage of a stretcher, officials involved in the rescue said.

The caver, Mark Dickey, 40, was part of an expedition exploring the Morca cave in southern Turkey when he suddenly suffered from abdominal bleeding last week. Unable to communicate from underground, one of his colleagues made the arduous, hourslong climb to the surface and sounded the alarm last Saturday.

In the days since, more than 180 people from eight countries, including Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine and the United States, have joined the rescue effort, many of them camped out near the cave's opening in a remote part of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey — and up and down the cave itself.

Dickey's medical condition and the depth and confines of the cave will make his rescue a highly complicated logistical feat.

“This is one of the most difficult cave rescue operations in the world,” Recep Salci, head of the rescue department for Turkey's national disaster relief organization, said in a phone interview Friday.

While teams have reached Dickey and medics have given him blood transfusions and medicine, other cavers have used explosives to widen narrow passages to facilitate his exit. Doctors could greenlight his evacuation today, Salci said.

But the process will be arduous. Although a fit, experienced caver could take 15 hours to reach the surface from Dickey's location at a camp about 3,400 feet below the surface, the trip on a stretcher could take three or four days, Salci said. Dickey will have to be transported by other cavers with safety straps or on a stretcher.